


Sand Between Your Fingers

by Barkour



Category: Thor (Movies)
Genre: F/M, Future Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-10
Updated: 2013-12-10
Packaged: 2018-01-04 05:16:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 822
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1076970
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Barkour/pseuds/Barkour
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sif and Loki clash again.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sand Between Your Fingers

She caught him square in the face; his nose burst with pain. Blood painted her fist. The last of his illusionary selves flickered out behind her, and Loki danced back. He wiped the blood from his nose with the back of his hand and flicked away.

"Trust you to turn to brutality."

Sif smiled thinly and readied her glaive. She held nothing back; she never had. If he let her, she would kill him. The musculature in her arms corded; her strong shoulders braced. As ever, she was beauty itself.

"Tell me," Loki called as he tucked a hand behind his back. The knife dropped from his sleeve. "How did you find me among my shadows?"

"I always knew you," said Sif softly. His blood dripped from her knuckles. Her fingers framed the long hilt of her glaive. If she did kill him, what poetry.

"Not so well as you thought," he said, and in a fluid motion, he dropped low, brought the knife out, and swung for her knees.

Sif dodged the blow, but she lost half a step; her heel sank into the loose earth. He ate up the distance, and turned as she drove her glaive for his shoulder. The metal kissed only the air left of his ear, and he, rising like a striking snake, kissed only her cheek. Her skin was warm, not soft but dry; the arid realm she'd chased him through had done her no favors. He lingered a moment; a moment was all he had.

"Bastard," snarled Sif, and she lunged for him. Her fist, he avoided. The kick she aimed for his gut he did not: she struck him hard in the hip and he tumbled. His knife fell somewhere. Her glaive was what concerned him most.

The tip came to rest at his throat. Loki stilled. He held his hands up at his shoulders, his palms turned out to her.

"Charlatan," she called him. "False tongue." Her breath came quick, thunderously so, but not once did the glaive waver.

"Peace, Lady Sif," he said. Her name had always been sweet on his false tongue. Through his eyelashes, he gazed up at her, past the edge of her glaive and the blood still slick on her knuckles. "Once you welcomed my kisses."

That humorless smile flashed again. 

"When I knew you," she said. A cruel echo. He offered her a smile of his own in reply.

Her hair was loose now and wild, cropped at her shoulders, and the blackness of it gleamed as fiercely as her polished chestplate. He didn't know when she'd cut her hair, only that it must have been in the many long years since last he'd seen her. 

Loki touched his fingertips to the side of the blade. Her shoulders tensed, as did her arms, but he made no move to push the glaive from his throat. He only slid his fingers up to caress that honed edge. The sharpness of it stung the tips.

"If you mean to kill me," he said, "won't you get on with it?"

Her eyes were dark, nearly as dark as her hair, and her face was well-burnt from the sun. If he stroked her cheek now, he'd leave light trails of blood along the ridge of bone. A muscle in her jaw fluttered twice. Her shoulder rose a fraction. Not once did she look away from his face, not did he look away from her regard. He didn't expect he'd see her again for a long while. This moment would have to do.

Her right hand, so tight upon the glaive's grip, eased, not much. He felt the slight turning of the glaive near his throat, in the air against his skin. Loki smashed his arm against the glaive, knocking it away from his neck, and in the sliver of a second it took for Sif to steady her hold, he'd rolled away, snatched up a handful of loose soil, and come back up onto his feet.

"Don't you dare," she said. Her mouth had pinched, her brow knit. The tip of the glaive dragged, lower than her hands. A deep thrum filled her voice. She said his name then: "Loki--"

"The next we meet," he said, "I'll ask before I take a kiss."

The soil had got into the cuts on his fingers; the grit burned. Sif swung her glaive back and reached for him, her steady, sun-reddened hand turned up to him, her fingers uncurling. He brought his hand to his mouth and blew dust between his fingers, a great cloud of it that swallowed Sif. He didn't blink but watched her, all of her, as she vanished into that vast bank of earth. She closed her eyes against the onslaught; she turned her face from it. The shadow of her fingers, still reaching for him, was what he saw last.

When the dust and wind settled, he'd gone.

**Author's Note:**

> Still trying to get back into the habit of writing.


End file.
